


that for myself i breathe (when i breathe for thee)

by Rayellah



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-09
Updated: 2017-05-09
Packaged: 2018-10-29 20:45:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10861761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rayellah/pseuds/Rayellah
Summary: “You’re beautiful,” Sombra whispers. Widowmaker doesn’t understand why she says it. She blinks once, twice, and her expression does not change. She doesn’t know what Sombra expected.





	that for myself i breathe (when i breathe for thee)

Sombra isn't nervous. She's been walking Talon’s halls for long enough, now, and refuses to be intimidated in what is almost, technically, her home. She speaks to the higher-ups with the ease of someone who knows she is useful, indispensable, even, because until things change, she is. 

She knows all their secrets, anyway. They don't know that, but she does. Even after she isn't useful, she can probably still keep herself alive with that alone.

There are parts of this building she has never seen, but that doesn't matter. This is hers, all of it, and she refuses to be frightened.

\--

Widowmaker remembers being Amélie faintly, distantly, like it was something a little more real than a dream and a little less real than being Widowmaker.

(Her losses: love and smiles and summer being her favorite season and the need to breathe like other people do. And her gains:)

(Well. She has gained something, surely. Besides the knowledge of how to shoot, besides isolation hollowing out the inside of her chest into something icy and still. She's gained something. She'll think of what that is. In time.)

Her bedspread at this particular Talon base is a deep red. Widowmaker did not like the color red when she was Amélie, and she does not like it now. And yet they keep offering it to her, as if, should they plaster the blood-color in enough places, it will keep her from noticing the ways in which her room is just a glorified cell.

It doesn't. One doesn't need to be as observant as Widowmaker to notice blatant deception.

So here she is, standing in the room, that is just a step above cell in terms of comfort, and a step below barracks in terms of privacy. She knows the mirror is just one-way glass. She knows Talon watches their assets. She knows that she is an asset. Of course she knows.

So she sits down on her bed, and she waits. She doesn't need as much sleep as she used to, but she does need a bit.

\--

They treat Sombra like a child. They, all of them, do. Even (or perhaps especially) Reaper. She is a woman of thirty and though her childish persona is perfectly crafted, people with whom she works should be able to see it for precisely that: a persona. The higher-ups look at her like an infant in need of a coloring book, not a tech-gifted genius in her own regard. Reaper views himself as a glorified babysitter. Sombra walks through buildings and eyes land on her just long enough to establish her as a curiosity before they dart away again. 

Every day, Sombra builds a scream in her chest, carefully sculpting the edges of that scream until it is something bright and glowing and metallic and loud, enough to shatter Talon’s base. She holds that scream in the pit of her throat, just above her heart. 

She has to swallow it down every day, of course. Her stomach is a wishing well of old angers. She is so, so tired of this -- she is so tired -- and the worst part is that this is as good as it's going to get for her, unless she stays exactly as lucky as she has been. This is her life now, and it looks like there will never be a time when Sombra can scream. She could pass every test Talon sets for her, be the best asset she can be, and she will never once be able to open her mouth and let out what she feels. 

It will live in the hollow of her throat, above the sternum, always, until she swallows it down. 

\--

Widowmaker mouths old words of love to herself in the dark. Her masters are none the wiser.

\--

Sombra, by all rights, should annoy Widowmaker, she slouches like a teenager, wears her hair messily, pokes and prods and keeps trying to _befriend_ Widowmaker, like she doesn’t get that Widowmaker is cold by design, that if Widowmaker shows Sombra the feelings she keeps off her face, then that’s it. Talon will realize that she is imperfect. This is all she has.

And she should hate Sombra when Sombra is talking or laughing or pacing, but she doesn’t.

They’re on another mission together, and -- oh. Oh.

How can you hate someone so beautiful? Beauty has always been _it_ for Widowmaker, even back when Widowmaker was Amélie, and Sombra is combat at its most beautiful: she makes fighting look effortless, intentional. She shoots and flits in and out of existence and Widowmaker watches the movement of Sombra’s wrists, the perfect execution of her leap through the air as her translocator pulls her back behind enemy lines just before she collides with the ground… and wants to have her. Or be her. Or touch her, just once, just to see.

\--

Talon’s director has a cluttered desk, notes piling up atop a laptop computer whirring discontentedly, and even that atop a desk calendar. Paper is secure, Widowmaker remembers Sombra saying. Paper cannot be hacked. It seems the director agrees.

When the director notices her looking, he shuffles the papers into a pile and flips them upside down, not breaking eye contact.

“Widowmaker,” he says.

“Director,” she responds. Nobody has a name here.

“A new recruit says you attempted to kiss him.”

She looks at the director with as much contempt as she can muster. “He wanted me to.”

“Widowmaker,” the director says, raising an eyebrow. “You cannot--”

“And why not?” Widowmaker asks, leaning forward slightly. “A spider cannot play with her prey?”

“They are soldiers,” he snaps. “Not prey.”

“I do not believe that is the case,” she says slowly, clearly, each word carefully measured between her teeth. “I wished to kiss him. I kissed him. It was mutually enjoyable. Are you worried about lawsuits? Do not. You will keep that under wraps somehow. Imagine if that got out. Security, dipping its pen into the organization’s ink. The organization’s product. Oh, monsieur. The scandal.”

The director is silent. Widowmaker takes the time to study him. He has more wrinkles than he did when she first met him. She wonders how many of them are hers. When he goes home at night, does he lie awake in the dark and worry about her? Does she want him to?

“I’m sorry, Widowmaker,” he says. “We’ve made you so vicious, haven’t we.”

Oh.

Oh, what a patronizing thing.

\--

Sombra is fascinated by Talon’s Widowmaker, she’s something fully, fascinatingly unique. As a child, Sombra had read about religion, defacing the margins of charity-bibles with childish drawings. Still, the descriptions of Old Testament women still stay with her-- they sounded astounding. Women who are salt and rain made flesh, women with little vanity, with harshness under their fingernails, too-wide mouths and a taste for apples.

When you get right down to it, that’s how Widowmaker looks, to Sombra.

\--

Widowmaker is confined to her room after certain hours, unless she is being deployed. The door might be locked, but she wouldn’t know. She does not bother checking. She sits in her red bedspread and lays out mission reports until the color is almost completely hidden beneath typed-out information. She scrawls notes on the dossier of her next target. Is this home? This room? Is this what home feels like?

She does not know. She may not have ever known. Every night she is not deployed, she returns here. Every night, they may or may not lock the door. Is that what home is?

If this is not home, then what is? Memories of Gerard that she cannot quite hold the edges of anymore? The roof of this building, where she sits sometimes for lack of other option? The slivers of the world she can make out through the window?

Home is an outdated concept, too, she thinks. Like breathing normally, and regret. She cannot remember it.

Widowmaker’s face does not change as she cuts these questions into methodical chewable bites, and swallows them down.

She sighs through her nose and returns to the papers on her bed, piles of them, and flips impatiently until she finds it: Sombra’s file. Widowmaker is not, technically speaking, supposed to have this, but the curiosity cannot be abated. The Widowmaker has been struggling with isolation lately, one of Talon’s many psychologists had said. The Widowmaker needs a friend.

(He was fired for saying so. Possibly killed. Widowmaker does not mourn, but she is curious.)

A picture from Sombra from a few years ago is paperclipped to the inside of the file. She looks much the same, but her jaw is clenched, her eyes scared. There is no context to suggest where this photo was taken. Widowmaker reaches out her fingers and --

\-- turns to the next page, quickly, before she can contemplate regret, and the past, and other such stupid things. She will not look desperate, not when she knows her masters are always watching her.

\--

Sombra lies on her stomach in the dark. She used to sleep on her back, but since her upgrade, she can’t anymore. She used to sleep on her side sometimes, too, but when you do that, your back is turned to something. Now her back is turned to nothing. And she dreams, she dreams of what she wants. And what she wants is this: the chance to own the world.

\--

“You’re beautiful,” Sombra whispers. Widowmaker doesn’t understand why she says it. She blinks once, twice, and her expression does not change. She doesn’t know what Sombra expected.

\--

On Widowmaker’s eighth mission with Sombra, Sombra gave her an antique copy of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Sombra half-danced around Widowmaker, fingers centimeters from her skin but never quite touching.

She did not say goodbye to Widowmaker when she last went for reconditioning. She was not even sure if Sombra noticed the lack of her. She never asked, and when she returned it was as if nothing had changed.

Sombra isn’t her husband. It seems, somehow, unfair that Widowmaker now has more vivid memories of Sombra than of Gerard. Sometimes, when she is falling asleep and her rewriting slips, when her memories unpack themselves from dusty boxes, Gerard holds her hand with Sombra’s hand and they walk along the beach while Gerard tells her about data-shares between omnics in Sombra’s voice.

It’s unfair. Widowmaker knows that this is a childish complaint, but she has it anyway. Sombra is not her husband, Sombra doesn’t love her (surely doesn’t love her, how could--). Why is she the one she still has? The one she gets to keep?

\--

Sombra and Widowmaker go on three dates that are just different variations of “how long can we convince Talon we’re still scouting out this location, not sneaking coffee out of the nearest cafe” before Sombra puts her foot down and finally takes Widowmaker to a movie.

It isn’t a terribly romantic movie. Not that it’s bad, but it’s just… it’s an action flick, which Sombra is agonizing over the entire time. Was that a bad choice? There are car chases and explosions and Widowmaker almost smiles when a car hits a wall and then a man flies from the car at ninety miles per hour and goes _splat_ against the brick.

And then they’re kicked out of the movie, because Sombra won’t stop laughing at the hero’s dramatic death scene-- or rather, at the commentary Widowmaker keeps up the whole time, about how blood loss doesn’t look like that, and if he really did get shot in the lung he shouldn’t be able to spend so much time talking to his love interest, and _Sombra, stop laughing, this is a serious complaint._

\--

Widowmaker has just finished up a mission, a clean kill, one of the cleanest in a long while. When she returned to base, she checked the time. Two hours before it’s time to lock up the asset, so she finds Sombra.

(A note on Sombra: as someone who does not technically work for Talon, as a _freelancer_ of sorts, she is given her pick of accommodations on those occasions when she needs to stay on base. An additional note: that means she picked a storage closet, filled it with tech and a small cot, and called it a day.)

There is no grief in the lines of Widowmaker’s face. She is incapable of feeling it. Still, Sombra seems to see something in her eyes, because she sets aside her work for the moment and lets Widowmaker collapse into her arms. Widowmaker does not know why she collapses like a house of cards, does not feel remorse or grief or any other such useless emotion, but something in her is very tired anyway.

“This is supposed to get easier,” she says, voice calm and not shaking even a little bit. If she was not currently pressing her face into the shoulder of an untrustworthy hacker, Widowmaker would look just as she always does: eyes narrowed, voice steady, fingers unclenched. Still, she has collapsed. “It should grow easier, or perhaps I should be better at it.”

Sombra doesn’t seem to know what to say, merely combs out Widowmaker’s ponytail with her long nails and sighs. “Oh, querida. You’re everything you’re supposed to be.”

“I appreciate that,” Widowmaker says, and Sombra can’t tell if she means it, not because she cannot read Widowmaker for lies (she can, it’s only a little bit harder than reading anyone else) but because, she assumes, Widowmaker does not really know if her own words are true.

Sombra laughs, a sound she’s always used to create confidence from nothing. “You don’t sound human sometimes.”

Widowmaker blinks once, twice. “Why is that such an important thing to be?”

“You like what you are?”

“And why not? Everyone should love what they are.”

“Talon took so much from you,” Sombra counters, almost like a challenge. Like this is a game that they play (it could be a game that they play).

“So has life,” Widowmaker responds, almost contemplative. Sombra doesn’t know what to say to that. “It’s strange, how easy it is to lose pieces of ourselves, even with help.”

\--

They aren’t supposed to kiss-- not at the coffee shops they don’t officially visit, the safehouses between missions, certainly not on base in Sombra’s broom closet.

They do it anyway, though. And though Widowmaker’s heartbeat has been slowed to the point of near-nonexistence, she has found yet another thing that makes her feel something close to alive.


End file.
